Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 412

The future of furniture design are motion-controlled, shapeshifting chairs

The promise of MIT’s Transform project, currently showing at Milan's Design Week, is that your living room suite of the future will be a lot different. Furniture will be able to transform itself to accommodate you, or your girlfriend, or your kid. This rigid wooden swivel stood that I’m currently sitting on, for instance, could instantly rearrange itself at the snap of my fingers into a relaxing recliner. 

This ergonomic dream is based on the inFORM project that has the lofty aim of bringing digital tech into the physical world. We reported on it a while ago. And though right now Transform looks about as comfortable as getting an MRI scan—just some unnerving, shuddering white cubes rising and falling in response to your waving at them—the Tangible Media Group has high hopes. "Imagine a car with a shapeshifting dashboard!" a spokesman from the lab tells Fast Company. And then I imagine this thing malfunctioning as I steer off a ledge. 

Nintendo Girls Club—a hub of fashion, cuteness, and mixed messages

Four women writers take on Nintendo’s strangest initiative ever.

Even the Ocean rescues the yin-yang from tackiness

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Finding a place where I don’t belong in The Elder Scrolls Online

It’s harder than you might expect.

A game where people pretend to be airplanes. Seriously

Cult of the Wind is a game on Steam Greenlight that imagines people competing in multiplayer WW2-style dogfights. The thing is they do it without airplanes. According its webpage, there are pretend machine guns, pretend explosions, and pretend sputtering noises of airplane propellers made with characters’ mouths. I personally was tickled that a bullet point is “weird noises.” 

As far as how Cult of the Wind plays, it looks like an arena shooter. OK, a totally bat-shit arena shooter. But when you look at how these pilots running with arms extended to the side can transform into the shaded outline of a fighter plane and zip across the sky, you realize how a little imagination goes so very far in death-match. It should prove really fun if you can stomach the basket-case overtones. 

Prepare to hear Sir David Attenborough's soothing voice in virtual reality

A VR mask seems like the furthest thing from the wild. After all, you’re strapped into isolating goggles that would probably get you killed if you wore them to the park, much less in the woods. But a production studio who is shooting a documentary called Conquest of the Skies thinks that VR is the best way to view nature from home, which is why they are currently filming a 360-degree version of the show for Facebook’s Oculus Rift. 

The location of the shoot is Borneo, a largish island situated between Malaysia and the Philippines with mountains and rain forests home to elephants and orangutans. And the best part is it’s being helmed by Sir David Attenborough, the British naturalist who has worked on a wide array of nature documentaries with the BBC dating back to the 50s, including recently Planet Earth, the set that everyone bought to marvel at the brilliant picture of their new high-def TVs. It looks like he’s posed to be on the cutting edge of visual entertainment tech yet again.

Watch speedrunners obliterate Half-Life in 20 minutes 41 seconds

Okay, so you’ve beaten Half-Life like 15 years ago and felt pretty good about yourself. But these guys just beat it in 20 minutes 41 seconds. Well, the word “just” is a bit of an exaggeration. The speedrun, posted on YouTube recently, was the result of four years of “painstaking theorycrafting, execution,” and that crushing feeling that surely comes with playing the same single-player shooter over and over and over. This is commendable because it’s a world-record, and because a game that normally takes 8 hours was completed in less time than it takes me to take shower. (Hey, I enjoy my showers!) Quadrazid, CRASH FORT, coolkid, pineapple, YaLTeR, Spider-Waffle and FELip deserve oodles of credit. Hats off.

The new Miegakure trailer makes Fez look like child’s play

Truly mystical squares.

An arcade cabinet restorer creates the light-cycle racing game of our dreams

For us children of the ‘80s who had our young and naive brains dazzled by Disney’s Tron, it doesn’t get much better than a sit-down, light cycle-riding arcade game. Oh, wait. Yes, it does. That’s because this light-cycle racer is VR-enabled, played while sitting on a scrap of wood and welded metal while strapped into a sense-depriving mask—perhaps a bit dangerous, but oh so worth it! 

This wicked invention is the passion project of The Arcade Man, an expert at restoring classic cabinets and pinball tables to beautiful, pristine condition. For aesthetic reasons, and just because motorcycles are far more awesome to ride in arcades than cars, he has opted to go with the redesign of the famous cyberspace cruisers for 2010’s Tron: Legacy. But the game itself is still classic light-cycle battles, cutting zigzag patterns through grids to sling your rivals into neon-colored jet walls. 

An exploding piano lies at the heart of Cover Me's abstraction

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